OT: What's your most random injury or thing that has happened to you?

Ok people, it's the off-season and there are only 2 games of real football left...

It is also a snow day here and things have been a little random/interesting in our household. Which led me to this thought topic.

We got about 7 inches of snow here over the weekend. Due to the weather (and the fact that I had a snow day and didn't have to go anywhere today), HokieEnginerd took my car to work today. He called a while after he left and said "I didn't make it to work." I thought he hit some ice or something and wrecked. Fortunately that was not the case..

He was going down 66 at about 70mph and he hit a piece of metal. The rear driver's tire goes flat immediately-- a blowout. He feels it and pulls to the shoulder. The car behind him pulls over too, he thinks they are just checking him; but no, they have a 3-4 inch hole in their bumper. Whatever HE hit got thrown into the car behind him. So he called a tow truck because changing a tire on 66 is not the smartest of ideas. My car gets taken to the garage for a new tire. The garage called him this afternoon and told him that whatever he hit split the rim in half and the tire was the only thing holding the rim together. Apparently the garage had NEVER seen anything like that and called everyone who was working to come see it.

So my other random moments are more funny and less life-threatening,
When I was teaching at my previous school, I got stuck ON TOP of my desk. I was sharpening pencils during indoor recess and my pencil sharpener stopped working. I pulled out my desk and unplugged the sharpener, because I was not going to stick my finger in it while it was plugged in. I look and don't see anything stuck, so I go to plug it back in. I had to climb on my desk to plug it back in. Apparently I did not pull out my desk far enough and got stuck on top of it with my arm between the desk and the wall. I had to send one of my students next door to get my friend/co-worker to come get me free.

Random injury #2:
I was baking something and got my finger stuck in the electric hand mixer. I had plugged in the mixer and was inserted the beaters. One did not go in correctly and I hit the eject button to fix them. The eject button also happened to be the power button. When I hit the button, the mixer turned on and my finger was in the beater blades. Surprise! Fortunately, there was no major damage to my finger---no blood (although possibly a chipped bone.)

So what is the most random/ "how the hell did that happen" moment for TKP?

Comments

Years ago while training someone at the Skycoaster at Kings Dominion, I didn't get out of the way of the flyers feet when the went prone. I got railed in the misters and passed out. Woke up to a slew of emergency crew who had sympathy, but not enough to stifle their laughter.

Long story short is that I am still fertile.

Now, Cole, when you shift the gear and that little needle on the tach goes into the red and reads 9000 RPMs, that's bad!

I think it was 2005 but may have been 2006. The heavy response was due to it being dispatched as a "high impact" injury making everyone think one of the flyers hit something. No, though. Just me getting lifted off my feet by my balls.

Now, Cole, when you shift the gear and that little needle on the tach goes into the red and reads 9000 RPMs, that's bad!

I once tore my Achilles tendon. It wasn't due to any kind of competitive or organized sports though. I was simply running through a field.....at night..... behind Foxridge.... with questionable sobriety.

I found TKP after two rails from TOTS then walking back to my apartment and re-watching the 2012 Sugar Bowl. I woke up the next day with this username.

I tore my labrum in my right shoulder. About 5 years ago I was playing tennis. I couldn't miss my serve so I just kept crushing it. It was a weird service game for me if I lost a point. I've never been this on fire in my life, so I kept pushing it by hitting bigger and bigger serves. Well, the match ends (definitely won this one) and all is well. No injuries, I just feel great. I get in the car and start driving away. Whatever is on the radio pisses me off so I lift my arm up to change the station...and a flash of pain shoots down my arm and I hear something click.
So I didn't tear my labrum while serving too hard. Instead it was from changing the radio station 😑

EDIT: It was likely due to the stress from the match that it tore. But, still.

"That move was slicker than a peeled onion in a bowl of snot." -Mike Burnop

It was the WVU @ Miss St game, same day as Duke leading Bama at halftime (went to both games). There was a Russell Athletics pregame village thing to promote the last of the brand as it was dying. They had this thing call "Arm Chair QB". Its basically a mechanical horse but with a recliner they strapped you in to. It however was not a soft as a recliner. Nor did it recline. A couple of kids were doing it and it was rather tame, so I got in line (The MSU basketball team was behind us, so not the only adult). So I get strapped in and they turn it on and they got right to a setting higher than what the kids were at. So I start throwing footballs into the hole. I dont miss any of the throws, so they turn it up to 11, I hit a couple of those, but then I hit my back oddly against the chair. I throw another football and then say F it becuase I am just getting tired of my back hitting the chair. Chuck the last 2 balls missing both because I no longer care. I get down and think nothing of it. The guys operating it had to explain to the like 8 year old next in line that they wouldn't turn it up to the level I was at. I dont remember if the kid still went. A couple of the basketball players backed out.

For the next couple of years I would get an odd pain/knot in my back where I hit the chair. It took getting a new bed and new work chair to finally get my back feeling better all the time.

Torn ACL and partially torn meniscus playing soccer. Of course, the injury didn't occur on a rough challenge or anything like that. When challenging a defender for a loose ball, one of the opposing player's studs stepped through one of the loops of my shoe strings and yanked my left leg forward as my right leg was planted. This action bent my knee sideways as I was thrown into the air. Very painful. Do not recommend.

I had surprise microfracture surgery. I had a plica on my MCL that kept bothering me, most people they grind away, but mine didnt. So they opened up my knee to heat gun my MCL. While in there they took a look and found I had a massive divot in my cartilage. So without waking me they performed microfracture surgery. I woke up and the nurse was explaining that I couldn't put weight on it for 2 months, but sounded routine in her explaination. I was still drowsy from the anesthesia and couldn't vocalize how she was wrong and I should just be sore for the weekend. The friend that took me came in to tell me how messed up my knee was.

High sprain of ankle when we moved into new house in dayton. It had one of those decks low to the ground and step into the yard. The previous owners had neglected the house including the backyard. It had little pavers right at the opening to the deck but buried in the grass. The grass had grown up a bunch between them. My wife unbeknownst to me had removed them. The grass was still high but there was a 5 inch extra drop. I stepped off think the grass was where my foot would stop and it didn't. My foot went into the hole and the dog I had on the leash pulled my and POP I passed out and my new neighbors I'd never met came running over calling 911. My soon to be neighborhing fire jurisdiction responded and carried me into the house and had to sit me down on top of boxes in our living room.

Random injury #1 - I was walking through my office parking garage last Monday morning on my way into work. There are super low ceilings-- I'm only 5'10" but there are spots I need to duck. I know this because I've worked in this building for over 10 years. Anyway, I was walking along as normal and ducked under a pipe, but I didn't duck quite far enough - I hit the crown of my head on a nut that sticking down from the pipe. Drove over to urgent care and got 5 stitches in the top of my head. Great way to start a Monday.

Random injury #2 I was at a Boy Scouts meeting in middle school. We had our meetings at a preschool and they had stacks of plastic milk crates that I think kids used to put their stuff in. There was a stack of empty ones though and one kid decided to kick the stack, just for the hell of it I guess. They went flying, one towards me, as I was standing maybe ten feet away talking to someone else. I turned just in time to catch it in the face and get a cut right under my eye. Just a few stitches.

Random injury #3 I was in 7th grade gym class. We were playing dodgeball and another kid was backpedaling to get out of the way of a throw. He backpedaled right into my back, causing me to go crashing face first into the floor with his body weight coming down on top of me as well. Broke one of my front teeth clean in half on the gym floor and have had a fake front tooth ever since.

One day I woke up with a swollen elbow and didn't think anything of it. Fast forward to the next day and I can barely move my arm and have a fever. I went to the ER and was diagnosed with septic bursitis (infected tennis elbow). They gave me an antibiotic IV for a few hours and I was good to go. I have no idea how I got the bursitis or the infection and was apparently pretty close to permanently damaging (or losing) my arm.

Bonus Story: Fast forward about a year from the elbow thing and I'm in the process of buying a new car. The salesman is acting strange and tells me that his elbow is bothering him. He explains the symptoms to me and I urge him to go to the ER because it was exactly what I had experienced. I call the dealership 3 or 4 days later and they told me that my salesman had waited a few days to go the hospital, and the infection was so severe that he had to have surgery. I'm not sure what happened to him and have never seen him at the dealership since.

During my junior year of high school I shattered my pinky finger bone when I grabbed the edge of a pool table and someone threw a pool ball against it. It was in the middle of wrestling season and I put off going to the doctor for weeks until someone stepped on it during practice. The coach convinced me I needed to go to the doctor. Long story short, I had to have multiple surgeries and pins put in my finger for 8 weeks. It was pretty embarrassing to tell people I was sideline for the rest of the season due to a finger injury.

Appendicitis while on vacay at the end of August. Laparoscopic Appendectomy at Grand Strand Regional Med (thankfully, while it was very swollen, it had not ruptured). Also thankfully, got it done on the early part of my vacation so I didn't have to spend the entirety or rest of it in the hospital. No working out or lifting of 8-10 lbs + for 8 wks.

P.E. soccer game at a backwoods school where soccer is mainly just a random bunch of people on the field kicking a ball towards the goal with no inkling of the rules.

I'm jumping into the air to perform a header. Like, way high in the air. I was 5'8" but could dunk a soccerball... this white boy had ups. That's not to brag, but to give you an indication of just how high we're talking here.

Everything slows into that beautiful semi-frozen moment where You are Starring in "Something Incredible is About To Happen."

Then, everything slows even further as I catch movement out of the side of my eye, and there's Melinda, cranking her foot towards me to kick the ball that I am trying to do the header on.

When you are up in the air, there's really not much you can do to protect yourself. Those Kung-fu movies lie to you. Gravity and inertia are inescapable, and all that feeling of super high-adrenalin slow-mo does is prolong the agony of what horror is to come. Sort of like a zombie movie, but the zombies are feet.

Mindless, inexorable, testicle hungry feet.

Little known fact: Apparently one's testicles have a connection to one's lungs, which will instantly deflate in sympathy.

Same sort of scenario, but a soccer-based game some friends came up with that was played in an empty grain silo on a buddies farm. Ball is up in the air and I go to head it toward the goal when the guy playing keeper (was also starting keeper of the local Olympic development team) goes for a roundhouse and kicks my front tooth through my bottom lip. The crap part is I am 6'4" and he was about 5'9" and this was a total backyard screw around game, high kicking was uncalled for.

Just finished studying during a snowstorm. I made it back to my apartment where my friends were throwing the football outside. I quickly grab a glass bottle of beer and run outside. I hold the bottle in my mouth and tried to catch it. Ball went through my hands and hit my face. I chipped a tooth and lost the beer. I didn't even get drink a sip of the beer.

Not an injury but RANDOM:
So I was talking to HokieEnginerd tonight and came to the conclusion that the random crap always happens to MY car....

See OP.

A couple of years ago, the Check Engine Light came on in my car. He checked the code with his reader and found that it was an emissions issue---nothing too major, just something we would have to deal with before I got my tags renewed. So I drive my car as normal for about a month. We went to get our Christmas tree and were coming home. Coming off the exit, the car cuts off. We coast off the ramp and are able to restart the car, making it home safely. We take the car in to get checked out and tell them what the code said and what had happened. The mechanic called to explain the issue with my evap canister. The mechanic said that when he opened the canister, spiders POURED out... Not that there were spiders in the canister-- they poured out. This description gave me the image of pouring a drink into a cup..

1. I've been stabbed in the back in a sketchy part of the 757 and still have a hole on my back to prove it.

2. I almost drowned in the New three years ago, like "swallowing water and sinking but forced myself to shore to survive" close to drowning.

3. Hit a deer on 81 north last December while going 80 in the left lane. He jumped into the road 20 feet in front of my truck. I couldn't even hit the brakes. I hit it so hard his head flew off. 6 pointer. Pulled the truck over, bungee corded the front end together and limped Truck Norris home. If he had been jumping when I hit him he would have gone through the windshield. Went out and got drunk.

4. I almost got killed by a drunk driver who knocked my mirror off seconds after I had stepped into the truck and shut the door. Chased her around RVA for half an hour and got her arrested.

5. When I was 13 had a Portugeuse Man'o'war wash over me at the beach. Totally covered me in its stinging tentacles. They have been known to paralyze and drown people. It was so damn painful.

Other crazy shit:

Four years ago I was the lead suspect in a bar brawl at a Mexican Restaurant in Midlothian on Easter Sunday. I've never been to the restaurant. Took me a few hours to convince the cops it wasn't me.

I'm sure more stories will come to mind....

EDIT: I've got so many that I people have asked me to write a book. I forget a lot of them, but here are some more near death experiences which I was reminded of today when someone mentioned crashing cars... Also, my near bear attack.

1. Freshman year on Christmas Break I borrowed my Dad's mint condition, 1991 "Arrest Me Red" Corvette to head to a mid-afternoon movie date with a smokeshow I had met on 7th floor of West AJ who lived 45 minutes from my parents house. I made it 200 yards out of the driveway, was heading into the 35 mph corner in 4th gear at 80 MPH (which I had done many times, stupidly, I will add) when a dump truck comes around the corner and is halfway in my freaking lane. I hug the inside of the curve as much as I can but the rear right wheel catches, starting to spin the car. I over correct and shoot across the road, through a barb wire fence and miss the telephone pole by 15 feet. Car is nearly totaled, cop says "your dad is going to kill you, so I'm not going to write you a ticket." Had a stiff neck and had to go to work for the rest of the day to start paying for the car.

2. One year later, best friend and I (Hokie, roommate and one of the two who knocked my tooth out) and I are working on his Audi A4 at 2 a.m. on Christmas break. We are dead sober and he wants to take it for spin. I agree. We lived a quarter mile from each other and he pulls out of his driveway to the left away from where I crashed the Vette. We shoot down the road a few miles, speeding too fast but having a blast. Light rain outside. Turn around and come back towards his house and up this slight hill at 80 mph. I tell him to slow down but he says nope, I've done this a bunch on this curve, the All Wheel Drive sticks to the road. Well it didn't stick. He let off the gas and we spun sideways at 80, into the ditch and flipped into a tree, before rolling back upright in the ditch. My legs were pushed into the center console, I was covered in broken glass and gravel because when the car flipped my window blew out somehow and must have scooped up the gravel like a shovel and just poured it all over me. My hat had been sucked off my head and it was in the road. He was knocked out but I woke him up. Took me a minute or two but I was able to work myself out of the window and we called our parents. Mine came over minutes later (from a quarter mile away) and his came out of their house to see our wreck, which was right across the street from his farm. His dog ran over and was barking at us. We both had a few very minor scrapes but were fine physically. A bit shaken up. I just remember feeling like it was a bad roller coaster ride with Eminem "Like Toy Soldiers" playing. I can't hear that song and not think of crashing. My parents were actually relieved they told me much later one because they thought I had wrecked the family suburban one year after wrecking the Corvette. So, my best friend and I each wrecked cars when we were 18, each on 35 MPH curves, 1/4 mile from each other. If that isn't a country song.... Lessons learned, don't drive 80 mph and wear your seat belts.

Near bear attack story.... When I lived in Aspen in 2009-2010 there were tons of bears coming into town every single night to find food. We would hear or see them regularly. Closing time and I was walking back from the bar with an Australian girl back to the house she was a nanny at. We make out for a little bit and then part ways and I start heading back through town to the other side to my apartment. I'm strolling along a nice house and yard with a short white picket fence, when I hear this weird commotion to me left. I stop and turn and there is a bear with half his body leading into a big waste bin with flip top, the kind you put out of your house for pickup. Within seconds he realizes something is up. He stands up and starts growling and doing this crazy huffing noise. He's clearly not amused that I interrupted his dinner and he smelled like garbage, literally. I could see the outline of his head and ears from the light of a street lamp and he's ten feet away with a 2 foot high picket fence between us. Flight response kicks in and I spring across the street and down the road maybe 20 yards, whip out my swiss army knife to defend myself and turn around and look back. He is gone.

Next day I go to the fly shop and tell my story to the other guides in the fly shop. All of them have lived there awhile and say the bears are scared of humans for the most part, until you surprise them or are around their food or cubs. That's when they get mad and will hit someone or attack them. When they are upset they do the growling and huffing technique. If they are standing, like the one did to me, then it means they are really pissed. One of the guides had a good friend who had been killed by a big adult male that kept coming on his porch and he finally had a "showdown" with it and apparently lost.

A day later, news goes around town that same night, early in the morning a woman in the same neighborhood found a big bear in her kitchen going through her fridge eating food. She tried to shoo it out of kitchen with a broom. It kicked her ass and put her in the hospital. The local police apparently shot and killed it. I've always wondered if it was the same bear. I'm just glad he realized I was scared shitless of him and didn't chase me.

SECOND EDIT: If anyone wants to read the crazy as shit that happened to me today, please check out the Winter Fishing Thread.

You will see this game, this upset and this sign next on ESPN Sportscenter. Virginia Tech 31 Miami 7

Thank you, just realized I forgot to add my car wreck stories and close call to a bear attack. Just added. If something crazy happens to me, I begin telling my friends the story and they usually say, "well, this is something that would only happen to you..."

Holy hell, I cannot imagine. That is awful. I remember the rabies shot needles being extra long for some reason. Longer than other shots I've had. And they freaking hurt. Not sure if that was me imagining them bigger because of my fear or not.

What's crazy is I'm so scared of shots/needles, but have stuck fish hooks in myself many times and it doesn't faze me nearly as much. I am really scared of a fish hook to the eye though...

You will see this game, this upset and this sign next on ESPN Sportscenter. Virginia Tech 31 Miami 7

The bones around my knees both shattered, like a baseball bat to a windshield. It was idiopathic...

I was in a wheelchair from 2098 (edit 2008)-2010, this allowed the bones to recover and heal, but they still are not sure what the cause is/was. I also lost about an inch of height in the process.

As a kid, it is believed I was exposed to agent orange in the base housing deforestation as close as our literal back yard, that's the closest anyone has come to an explanation.

Anyways, you said random injury, that's about as random as you can get. I was walking my dog, legs gave out and I face planted. A week later at the doctor, I was told to leave there in a wheelchair or never walk again.

This was during rehearsal for a play in high school in 2006. I was playing a mechanic/cashier in a garage. The actor opposite me pulls a prop gun and I'm supposed to drop as fast as I can to the floor behind the register. I hit my elbow on the stool to the right of me. It felt like those times you hit your funny bone but 10x more painful and lasted 10x times longer. I've recently found I can't rest my right elbow on the arm rest on the way to Tech games.

Tore my labrum playing b-ball at McComas without any contact. Just reached for a ball a little too enthusiastically. Not that random but Tech related. I also sprained my MCL getting up from a table in Turner. Most random is probably the back spasms from picking up a menu at a restaurant.

Here lies It's a Stroman Jersey I Swear, surpassed in life by no one because he intercepted it.

Mrs CBRDog was cleaning ice off the top of her 4runner yesterday and tried to push a huge chunk off the roof. Unfortunately she was downhill and gravity is a bitch... Her coworkers probably think I punched her in the kisser.

.

.

We will definitely see some Wild Turkey, its just a matter of whether or not it is celebratory or consolatory

Honestly, it was easily the most pain I have ever been in. Only thing even remotely close was when I had to get a nerve block shot in the bottom of my foot.

At first, we thought it was a jellyfish, so I was trying to wash it with cold water and it was making it worse - turns out sting ray venom is neutralized by warm water. So in the ER, they had my foot in a bucket of water until they could get me into a trauma room, and every time the water started to cool to room temps I would begin shaking uncontrollably with pain.

By the time they got me into the room, my foot and about 1/3 of the way up my shin was paper white from the venom spreading, and they gave me some sort of shot to stop it from spreading (not sure how that works), and then had to suck it all back out of the cut/hole with an empty syringe. Luckily I didn't have any barbs in my foot so I didn't need surgery, so two massive shots of Toradol and I was happy haha

Walking back to my dorm one evening my junior year. See a sophomore inside coming towards door. Wait for him to come out. Rather than opening the door like a normal person, he jumps up, grabs a beam above the door, and kicks the door open, directly into my face. Think I'm fine, cheek is just bleeding a little, go over to my girlfriends place. A short time later, she accidentally elbows me in the head. A couple days later, I go get checked out, and sure enough, that elbow gave me a pretty severe concussion.

That was one of two concussions that semester. The other time I essentially got forced to give blood, got up too quickly afterwards cause I had to piss, made it to the head and promptly passed out and hit my head on the wall.

Then spring semester I had a couple TIAs, probably due to all the head trauma.

A few months after I graduated from Tech, I woke up with a weird feeling in my legs... It turned out to be guillain-barré syndrome. I lost total control over my body, and spent a few months in the hospital/rehab learning to walk again. To this day I still don't know how the hell it happened.. My fiance nick named me Lt Dan for a while too. Good times good times

As a student and younger graduate, I played a LOT of basketball. Basketball tried to kill me:
1. 1981: Some guy in War Memorial gym fouled the $h!t out of me and in the process stuck his thumb up to the first knuckle in my right eye. Making a long story short, I had to get laser surgery in Roanoke to seal a retinal tear. I still have floaters in my eye from that. I had a 4.0 that quarter (that tells my age), had to quit school mid-session (lost all of my $$$ that quarter) - no reading allowed for 6 weeks.
2. 1987: Pick up ball in Indialantic, FL with other competitive surfers (some pros); Broke my right middle finger on a steal. My finger hit the top of my wrist in the process. Those Tuesday and Thursday evening games were always fun with a bunch of great athletes. Always great, competitive games.
3. 1990: Tore my left ACL playing ball at lunch with fellow Harris Corp engineers in the Palm bay Rec Center.
4. 1998: Playing pick up ball in Boulder Creek, CA Rec Hall, wearing my knee brace to support left knee (above), I cranked the knee brace tighter as it kept slipping down my leg, Pushed off on a baseline spin move and tore my left Achilles tendon. Yep, the brace caused the injury. Rats!!
5. 2006: Re-tore left ACL playing pickup 1-on-1 against my son (he ended up played football at the Air Force Academy - great athlete). Double-RATS (I was winning that game at the time). He won (as usual). Games with him were always fun!

So, after all that, decided I liked walking for the rest of my life - No more basketball.

Not an injury, but a couple close calls: Competitive surfing in Central Florida meant you were in the water a lot and always when the waves were best. This certainly included Fall when the mullet run was always happening (surf by day, Snook fish by night!!). Which means, sharks... Seen plenty, but had a couple real close calls:
1. 1986: Surfing North Indialantic (old Gulf Station); was pulling an off-the-lip in a close out section and as I looked down a 6 footer right in the impact spot. Landed right on him, pulled it off, jumped on the board and bellied it in. Got to the sand, turned around, saw the shark roll over twice, regain composure and take off. Whew!
2. 1991: Surfing a lunch swell with a fellow Harris engineer. Waves were really good, about 3-5 ft (6 - 10 ft faces). Sitting in the line up and see a set coming, start paddling and a Hammerhead surfaces 20 ft in front of me - all 12 ft of him!! Water visibility is about 4-5 ft. That shark swam right past me going behind me as I pull my arms and legs up and sit totally still. I remember exclaiming "Oh Damn!". A guy 50 ft in front of me turns his head and says "Hey check out the shark!" I paddled right at him. There is safety in numbers - my self preservation kicked in. Never saw that shark again. Kept surfing for the rest of lunch break, great day actually.

I had just got off active duty and was working at the same unit on the civilian side during our unit's inaugural sports day. I figured I'd take it easy for the day so I signed up for kickball. Was a runner when an infield pop up got dropped, and my feet got out from under me as I had to turn and run. Pretty minor-looking scrape, definitely nothing worse than I'd experienced playing football for years. The next morning, though, the skin was turning black and falling off. Now I have a 3"x2" scar on my knee...from kickball.

This thread reminded me of Dyrell Roberts developing compartment syndrome in 2010 and the crazy picture he tweeted of his swollen leg filleted open. I couldn't find the tweet quickly but it is probably too gruesome to post anyway.

Personally I've been very fortunate with injures for the most part. I did get a black eye in high school from playing foxes and hounds at a church retreat. Someone made a break for base and a teammate and I came from opposite sides of the road and collided head-on. The other guy had a concussion but I had to go back to school with a massive shiner and a lame story.

Not really random because there was definitely some sanctioned violence involved, but when we were learning hand-to-hand combat in basic training and it came to fighting with the pugil sticks (If you aren't familiar, think of the oversized Q-tips from American Gladiators. If you're too young to remember American Gladiators, YouTube that shit and get ya learn on.), my company put the top 4 guys up against each other in a winner-take-all free-for-all. The company made a large circle and made a square with 4 pugil sticks in the middle with each person standing near the edge of the circle facing a pugil stick in the middle.

When the drill sergeant's yelled fight we all ran to the middle, grabbed a stick and squared off against the guy closest to us. Unbeknownst to me, but knownst to everyone else, one of the guys who had paired off apart from me had bested his man and was barreling toward me while I had my back turned engaged in my own fight.

He came up behind me, gripped the pugil stick like a baseball bat and cracked me right at the back of my skull.

I fell out like a sack of potatoes. But after I went down, I immediately jumped back up and went after him, or so I thought.

As I ran after him to exact revenge, my drill sergeant nearly tackled me. Confused, I asked, "What's wrong.? I got right back up. I'm still in this."

"Oh, nooooo. You've been out cold for about 30 seconds. You're done," he said.

TL;DR, Keep your head on a swivel, because CTE is a real thing.

"How the ass pocket will be used, I do not know. Alls I know is, the ass pocket will be used."
- The BoD

1) I broke my femur playing British Bulldog at a boy scouts meeting in middle school. Someone hit me with my left leg planted, and my femur snapped like a twig as my leg twisted. When I hit the ground, my foot was next to my stomach. Still amazed that it was a simple fracture (meaning bone never broke the skin) and there wasn't any significant damage to surrounding tissue, meaning rehab took only 4 months instead of 9+.

2) I broke my shoulder in a cross country meet in high school. At the start of the last meet before districts my senior year, I was tripped by one of the opposing runners. I stumbled forward for a few steps before flipping forward to avoid faceplanting. I landed on my back, got up fairly quick, and about a quarter mile later I realized my arm was feeling weird. I finished the 5k race, beat the asshole that tripped me, and went to the doctor just to find out that my shoulder was broken and my season was over. I figure I must have hit a root or something, since I fell a few feet away from a tree.

Many years ago I decided to give Tae Kwon Do a whirl. Lost a lot of weight, rediscovered my athleticism (which laid dormant under the 20+ pounds lost during my TKD training) and was feeling great in time for summer. One time at a friend's house I decided to do some running cannonballs into his pool, looking to get as much air and splash as possible. After all of that, was having a beer with my friend and feeling my knee getting a little stiff. Drove home and was barely able to walk to my apartment. Found out I sprained my knee, effectively ending my TKD experience because it took something like 3-4 months (no surgery or physical therapy) to feel like myself again.

Also, I am what I call a "violent sneezer". I actually pulled a butt muscle after a particularly hard sneeze.

Fuck my neighbors. On so many levels. Just one of my most random interactions.

I don't sleep much, thought I saw a car pull in to neighbor's house which was supposed to be vacant as she had moved and not yet sold the house. A little later I see lights go on in an upstairs bedroom, and I'm like whaddafuck? This is around 2 in the am and I call the police. Guy finally shows up and we talk. He get the picture , says let me get the guys together and we'll see what we find. About an hour later he comes back and is like yeah we banged on the door, noone answered and we're not allowed to break in, so we'll monitor the situation from the top of your street.

I am pretty much never the asshole than I am, but this rubbed me the wrong way. So I said to him, let me call my boys and I'll see you in a little bit. He looked at me strange and tried to calm me down. So I am making phone calls, trying to arrange folks who want to assault my neighbor's house with their weapons drawn because I clearly don't need any given my temperment. About 45 minutes later we're starting to wait for my boys to roll up to my house and the cop knocks on the door.

He is very weird and furtive says turn off the lights and lets go in your kitchen. So I do, but am very skeptical of what is going on. He starts telling me that they found my neighbor they gave permission to assault the house and they .... "well" I said.... "well I don't know how to tell you this".... I give him another glance like I will kill you if you don't get on with this.... then he announces "I met your new neighbor".... and he bursts out in laughter that cannot be stifled. I don't understand and am growing more pissed off. Evidently a down the street neighbor bought the house hadn't closed on it but swiped the keys from the garage entrance during a tour.... and figured fuck paying for a hotel room I'll just live in this unoccupied house that I'm going to close on anyway.

Pretty much fuck my neighbors. Kudos to the cop who I was so nasty to ( I was being honest, we were going to assault the place, and evidently I have friends who have weapons an unhealthy appetite for adventure),this guy up the street is a big dude, at least 6 2 240. They said he was in a bedroom closet and they had to open the doors of the closet before dialogue bagan. God bless the popo... people were probably going to die that night.

On the Friday night before the Syracuse game my freshman year (2003) I had some friends come down and visit for the weekend. Since, my parents were also set to come down for the game on Saturday, I decided to take it easy on drinking Friday, so that I wouldn't be hungover when they came down. I took my friends to a party off of Roanoke Street - well technically I think it was Owens Street. It was getting pretty late, and we were really far from my dorm on campus (lived in Cochrane) so I started to round up my friends to go back. We couldn't find one of my friends - looked everywhere for 30 minutes. Then, just as the police came to break up the party I spotted my friend running in the middle of the street with no shirt on with a beer can in each hand. I took off in a full sprint in a beeline to stop him, afraid as he was going to get arrested. I got about 10 yards away from the front step and ran straight into a barbed wire fence that separated the property (side note: who the fuck has barbed wire fence around their property in the middle of town?!!)

I was torn up - 2 large gashes on my chest, 2 on my leg, and 2 on my right arm. I took my shirt off and wrapped it around my chest, and grabbed my friends shirt to wrap around my arm, and started the walk back to the dorm. I had already made the decision that I was not going to the ER for stitches as I didn't want my parents to know what happened. So naturally, I asked my suitemate for bandages. The only thing they had was duct tape and gauze, so that's what we used.

The next day, I wore sweatpants and a hoodie to the game - I remember it being so hot and I was pouring sweat the entire tailgate. But determined to conceal my injuries, I kept the clothes on. Dad questioned my attire several times during the tailgate. It took me 5 years before I could tell my parents what happened.

Random Injury #1: Was five years old and my dad pitching overhand when I was practice batting for little league. The ball hit my thumb of my right hand between it and the bat and broke it.

Random Injury #2: Was playing basketball outside for recess when I was eleven years old. Was running fell and whole body weight landed flat on left ring finger and broke it, what's funny it everyday it feels stiff and have to pull and feel a pop on the knuckle to get it moving again.

Random Injury #3: Was playing youth league baseball game as shortstop when I was 12 years old. Runner stealing second had to catch the catcher's throw with my throwing hand (right hand) and tag the runner, metal cleats (it was by accident he was sliding to second) hit pinky and baseball broke it.

Random Injury #4: Was playing tackle football one Sunday on the Drillfield my sophomore, had the football and got tackled where my ribs hit the pointed end of the ball, rib contusions.

"Oi! What's a Horkie"
"I am ya Grot!"

"Horkies were made for two fings foighten' and winnen'" - Horkie Warboss

"That Gritty git doesn't exactly look like a Horkie, but by Gork and Mork it acts like one!"-Random Horkie Boy

Spring 2004, I was a freshman in high school and my brother was a senior. He was driving us to school, which required navigation of a tricky exit ramp that has a somewhat blind merge. In the 5 years we'd been driving that route, we had probably passed maybe 25-30 accidents there where the car that was merging in saw that another car was coming around the curve, stopped, and was promptly rear-ended by the car behind them coming into the merge -- because the car behind was looking at the bend, just assumed the first car continued through, and then tried to merge in after the car coming around the bend, only to drive right into the first car that had stopped.

Anyhow, this happened to my brother and I: rear-ended by an Asian man in a hideous Hawaiian shirt. His dad was with him but wandered off before the police arrived to make the report, etc. The driver maintained he owned a body shop and could fix everything up real good without going through insurance/calling the police/etc, which my brother smartly refused. Things get squared away, my brother's car gets fixed, and all is well in and good after a few weeks. Most importantly, everyone was okay, without even much lingering whiplash pain or anything.

My birthday is in early June, and my parents, brother and I went out to dinner and then to ice cream. We're about 15 miles/half hour away from where the original accident happened, and my dad remarks about the driver behind him riding his tail. My brother and I turn around to gawk awkwardly from the back seat, and the driver is the same guy that had hit my brother several weeks earlier, wearing the same hideous Hawaiian shirt. We didn't even know how to react -- just incredulous at the odds of that happening.

"Why gobble gobble chumps asks such good questions, I will never know." - TheFifthFuller

When I was younger I was constantly in the hospital for broken bones. Like 28 of them. Everyone chalked it up to me being a dumbass but they were all pretty stupid. Fractured a vertebrae from whiplash jumping off a swing. Broke a thumb catching myself from slipping. Broken tailbone taking a charge in rec basketball.

High school comes along, get slammed wrestling, land on the guys knee which brought on the worst pain I've felt in my life. Trainer and initial doctor report said bruised ribs. A few days later I'm in the ER for a CT and some urology tests. Turns out I had a block in my kidney since birth and likely were doing a shitty job of filtering out toxins. Doctors suspected it lead to my bones being brittle.

Only broken 2 bones since my surgery and those were far less dumb, hyper extended a pinkey to the point of my tendon ripping off a chip piece of bone and a shattered thumb (actually the third time I'd broken that thumb, got it good that time)

As painful as each of those was, the dumbest had to be the little toe. Walking across the yard in flip flops and my foot slips out in front of them and catches the edge of the bottom step of deck. I knew immediately it was broken, but there's nothing you can really do for a little toe! My paranioa goes up anytime I'm barefoot or wearing flip flops now! lol

1. The summer before our Freshmen year we were playing beer pong in a friends basement, he sunk the final shot, jumped up and did a fist pump, as soon as he landed he fell down grabbing his foot, we figured he just rolled his ankle and after a couple more drinks he was fine again, next day he sends me a picture of his foot/ankle swollen up to 3x its normal size, he went to get x-rays and had a "dancers break" in his foot, spent the first month at school in a boot.

2. Right after getting out of the boot he agreed to help one of the guys on our hall practice for his try out with the baseball team, was catching outside Slusher as our hallmate practiced his pitching, it was starting to get dark and my roommate suggested they stop, they agreed on one more pitch, it glanced off the top of his glove and broke the orbital bone right under his eye, leaving him with a nasty black eye for good measure. Definitely an eventful first couple of months of college for him.

I have also been injured while celebrating a beer pong win except I was standing in a doorway between the living room and hallway and when I jumped I rammed my head into the top of the doorway and woke up on a couch in another room.

Was in the locker room before an 8th grade basketball game. I was the definition of the kid who gets participation trophies. One of the starters was taping up his pinky finger because he had stubbed it earlier that day. So I get the idea that I want to look cool with taped fingers as well. I taped two of my fingers together with the medical tape and as I was trying to tear the tape...I hear a loud pop. Turns out I broke my wrist trying to tear the end of the tape off the roll. Spent the rest of the season in a cast being the water boy.

1. When I was about three or four I decided that I could maneuver riding my tricycle down the concrete stairs in front of the building we were living in. The front wheel managed to hit the top step before catching and rolling said tricycle and sending me toppling down the remaining stairs. Majorly scraped up but not too much worse for the wear. The worst part was my dad just shaking his head at my stupidity.

2. A couple of years after college I went to visit a buddy and his wife in Boston just before Christmas. We got in to some Jack Daniels Honey while cooking and ended up polishing off two bottles between the three of us. After dinner we decide that despite being about 15 degrees out that we wanted to go biking on a trail that was behind their place. My buddy rolled out in some of his wife's yoga pants and a pair of dress shoes. We get out of the building and he proceeds to jumps off of a planter that was maybe four feet tall and crumbled from the impact of his heel on the cobblestone street in front of their building. Still, fueled by JD we pressed onward. We manage to get the bikes from the bike garage deal they had in their building and headed out into the night. As we went to leave their parking lot he ducked his head between the handle bars and rode right under the arm of the gate at the entrance. Me being down a few faculties decided to replicate the maneuver without noticing that the handle bars were not the same on the bikes. I lower me head down and begin the passage only to have it interrupted by the incredible thud of my head meeting the gate arm. I managed to avoid falling over but was certainly staggered by the impact. The next day we were walking around and I went to scratch my head to be met with incredible pain radiating across my whole scalp. Unsurprisingly I had developed quite a knot from the impact. On a side note my friend absolutely ruined his heel. He couldn't walk right for weeks.

So at the UVA game this year, I got punched in the face and fractured my nose. The story: Our seats are in section 3, right below the student section, which was fairly rowdy. We also have a wall right behind us, which is great because we don't have anyone asking us to sit down ever. Once UVA pulled ahead, my dumb boyfriend looked at me and said he was ready to go because he didn't want to see UVA fans celebrating in Lane Stadium. I looked at him and told him I was here until the bitter end. He was driving and he had the keys, but it was my car, so we were staying. Then overtime happened and we won and suddenly I was hauled up over the guardrail behind us for post-game celebration. There was much hugging and high-fiving and rejoicing with the student section, but there was also one poorly timed hugged/high-five and a random student high-fived me right in the face. He felt awful and was terribly apologetic, but to be honest, my face was so cold by that point that I didn't really feel it. I also never bruised up too badly, and there was no blood. So it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Fast forward to Christmas at my nanny's house where my UVA cousins are. My mom and my aunts are all nurses. Ever since the game, my nose has been tender to the touch and crunchy when I press on it. Additionally, after the inflammation went down about 3 weeks afterwards, I could tell my nose was definitely...a little flatter on the left side, but I never went to get it checked out by a professional. So I take it upon myself to ask the opinion of my aunts and mother, well-within earshot of my UVA cousin, who was in a foul mood to begin with, but he just got worse and worse every time I brought it up. I guess 15 years straight was just too much for him and his delicate sensibilities.

Once UVA pulled ahead, my dumb boyfriend looked at me and said he was ready to go because he didn't want to see UVA fans celebrating in Lane Stadium. I looked at him and told him I was here until the bitter end. He was driving and he had the keys, but it was my car, so we were staying.

Reminds me of this: "My wife wanted to get a puppy, but I'm the man of the house, so we got a puppy."

I get muscle spasms in my back from time to time, caused by the most mundane actions. I've gotten them from doing a sit-up to get up off the floor, from swinging a tennis racket, and yes, from sneezing.

Reminds me of a few months back when I messed up my back just by breathing. Seriously, I inhaled and felt a tinge in my back. That turned into some severe pain a few hours later at work. I would find a comfortable spot in my chair that didn't require moving, but then I would have to move to answer a phone, and everything hurt. Everyone who called me that day was probably wondering why I sounded out of breath whenever I answered.

1. Three-years old, was playing "bullfighter" with some neighborhood kids at my grandmothers. I was the bull. Cape was apparently in front of my grandmother's stone foundation. Concussion.
2. Was cutting some wood on a table saw. Push sticks are a good thing. Unfortunately, I didn't use one. Slightly modified index finger. It's all there, just a little re-arranged.
3. Not me, but my Dad, along the lines of Lancer's car story at the top. My Dad took a chicken bone through the sidewall of a tire on his 68 Plymouth station wagon, blew the tire, and either the concussion of the tire blowing or the rim hitting the road broke the rim.

Too bad video cameras weren't around for my childhood. I could've been a youtube star. There are some funny ones on the reddit.

Additional couple of items that I'd tried to put out of my memory:

4. After the birth of my first son, friends brought food for us, which included a fully cooked turkey. First day after bringing the kid home, I pull out the electric knife to slice some turkey, get my hand instead....I think it was five stitches. Never operate electric knives on little or no sleep.
5. Was using a drill to cut a hole in something (don't remember what it was now), but was holding the piece in my left hand. Had a very aggressive drill bit (I think it was a 1/2 inch bit), one of those with a point in the center. Went through the piece, into my hand, between the first and second knuckle joint. Luckily no nerve/tendon damage, but a sweet W-shaped scar remains to this day. As does the sting of stupidity.

1. Broke my fibula playing rugby at VT. I never saw what happened, assume someone landed on my leg in a pile. Anyway, I finished the last 5 minutes of the game and vaguely remember bonging beers out of a road cone later that day. Being the stubborn idiot that I am, I didn't go to the doctor even though I could barely walk the next day. Finally, a couple weeks later when I still couldn't practice I accepted that it was more than just a bad bruise and got an xray, which confirmed the break. Luckily it was minor as broken bones go, and was pretty much healing on its own, so there was nothing to do but take it easy for another few weeks.

2. Tore my left pec while skydiving. Surgeon later speculated that I had damaged it while lifting and for whatever set of reasons it picked that particular moment to let go. The shock/pain caused me to briefly lose stability when I automatically pulled my arm in towards my body. I ended up going straight to reserve, which you pull with your left hand, and then had to reach above my head to grab the toggles to steer, then flare for landing... none of which was any fun at all.

"Those who jump into the void owe no explanation to those who stand and watch."
--unknown

Once while I was playing NCAA Football 14, there was a toothpick on the table that I was mindlessly playing with between plays of a very "important" game. As I've been told many times since then, any Xbox game can't really be "that important." Well one play I decided to stick said toothpick in between a crack in the table so that it was sticking straight up without thinking. I don't remember exactly what happened on the next play but it probably involved me throwing an interception that bounced off of two people or something along those lines. Well like any Xbox player that gets too invested in the game would, I let some steam off by hitting my hand down on the table. Looking back I didn't even hit the table very hard. However, I quickly learned that if it you hit the perfect spot (the crease where your palm and ring finger meet) it doesn't take much for a toothpick to pierce the skin. Unfortunately, I was only able to pull part of the toothpick out. So I had to spend the rest of the night in the waiting room of the Christiansburg ER in order to have a toothpick removed from my finger. In the end the doctor was able to remove it and left me no worse for wear except for the embarrassment of having to explain how I got a toothpick stuck in my finger while playing a video game. Sure was fun explaining to my parents why there was a charge from the hospital in my account, but I made sure to explain that there are much worse reasons to be in the ER. Also, after explaining my situation to many of the nurses and staff at the ER that night I found out that I am now part of a very exclusive club as the first and maybe only person that had to go to the Christiansburg ER in order to get a toothpick removed from their finger.

While on a cruise when I was a kid there were two basketball courts on either side of a little netted golf driving thing on the roof of the ship. It was dumb but pretty commonplace to walk behind the net to get to the other court if you had rides/were switching games.

So I got called over to the other court, so I start making my way through the thin passageway between the back wall and the net to driving area, and let me be clear about this next part, there is absolutely no way you can't see someone passing behind that net, It's like 15 feet away from where you are standing and is a net that is almost completely see-through. This old dude must have gotten pissed off (or is legally blind) and fucking drove a ball while I was passing by the net and it hit me square in the elbow. It blew up and turned black/blue. It didn't break anything but it definitely didn't feel good. I mean it honestly was a few feet away from hitting me in the temple. A driver to the head from 15 feet away could have killed me.

No offense taken my friend, I am certainly not unaware of the stupidity it requires to walk behind a loosely netted driving range thing haha. I honestly had forgotten about it for a really long time (I think I was 11 years old when it happened) until this thread got me thinking about the strangest injuries I've had.

I've had several injuries, almost all due to softball, but my poor wife got the worst in our family. She was visiting her mother who lived in Waynesboro in a house with a smooth asphalt driveway and a short but very steep incline from street to garage. She went to fetch the paper because her mother was about to do it in slippers and a robe. There was a skiff of snow on the drive and my wife slipped and fell. Tore her rotator cuff and broke her wrist. She had surgery for the cuff, and then developed a frozen shoulder. Had surgery for the frozen shoulder, then went into rehab too soon and had an unqualified dipshit at the PT who worked her too hard and apparently dislocated her shoulder in the first session. Same girl fell asleep on her once while "working" her arm. She ended up doing 5 weeks of PT with a dislocated shoulder until she finally convinced her doctor to x ray her shoulder to see what the big painful lump was in the front. It was her humerus. Discovered the dislocation which explained why she was in so much pain all along which they had passed off as her having a "low threshold" for pain. One more surgery to try to put shoulder back together ended in disaster and total disablement, including loss of most motor function in her dominant arm. She no longer has a rotator cuff. Surgeon was the VT team surgeon at the time and her PT business was owned by a former strength and conditioning coach for VT. Wife was a surveyor at the time and her working days were done, most likely because of untrained and not licensed person who did most of her PT. No good ending here, she'll be in pain 24/7 for the rest of her life. Needless to say, Dr. S and MG are curse words around our house.

Hooks in eyebrow, back of hand and finger, innumerable fin sticks/cuts, slices from sharp gill plates (walleye, stripers), bites from bluefish, snappers up to choppers, were most of it. Got all the hooks out myself, so no doctor, no biggie. Worst of all was a rainbow trout I got on a Rapala on a float on the Jackson River one February. The trout was on the rear treble hook, and his flopping got me hooked on two hooks of the forward treble. It was excruciating and because of the hooks in the finger, I only had one hand free which couldn't get the trout extricated from the rear treble. Luckily, the hooks had been de-barbed and I had a buddy up front in the canoe who aided me in releasing the fish, unharmed, then lending me his bandanna to wrap my bleeding finger. Still, no doctor, no biggie in my book.

These are NOT ME! But they are some of the most random injuries. These injuries happened to 2 of my friends (a brother and sister). So when these friends were younger, they got into the most random of accidents...
1. Brother broke his nose in band... He leaned over to get something and hit his nose on his trumpet case.
2. Brother also hurt his leg jumping off of a roof.
3. When sister was about 3 or 4, she almost gave herself a tonsillectomy. She was in the yard playing with a baton. She threw it in the air and ended up catching it in her mouth- vertically. The doctors said she almost split her tonsils in half.
4. Fast forward a few years. She was small for her age... She was playing with her dolls and using their old umbrella stroller. She decided to strap herself in the stroller and walk downstairs to the basement to show her dad. The wheel gets caught on the railing and she goes flying into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

When I was about 5 I stuck my finger in the hole of the middle seat belt buckle (stainless steel) in my dad's car. It swelled up a little and ended up getting stuck. We tried vaseline, wrapping my finger in string, ice to reduce swelling, and a ring cutting tool but none worked. They finally got it off by taking me down to maintenance and using a bench grinder.

Also while playing intramural flag football I was rushing the QB when he stepped up and I did a Dennis Byrd with my teammate, my nose going right into his shoulder. It hurt but wassn't bleeding so I get ready for the next play when I notice my friends looking at me concerned and asking if I'm ok. I say yea, let's get back to the game.

It wasn't until I got home and looked in the mirror did I learn my nose was broken and angled about 45 degrees off center. F&*# my firends for not telling me lol.

Not me, my dad. We're big skiers in my family - double black, the steeper the better, my favorite slope is called AMF (Adios Motherfucker) type skiers- and we'd just come down The Wall and were headed back to the lift on a slope called Turkey Trot. Dad catches an edge, goes down. No big deal right? Except he can't get back up. Because he separated his shoulder. On Turkey Trot.

We've never let him live it down.

He separated his other shoulder a few years later at the same resort, dicking around on the NASTAR course in powder skis.

I broke a bone in my right foot running through the Atlanta airport trying to make a connection on a work trip. Started to fall, but "caught" myself and put all my weight on the outside of my foot. Kept telling myself it was just a sprain. Made another connection in LAX to get to my destination of San Diego. Went to a urgent care the next day after my foot ballooned up to the size of a football. The doctor was pretty sure it was hairline fracture. The X-ray showed a clean break, The doctor was pretty impressed with my pain tolerance. Ended catching a red eye home that night to see a orthopedist next day. Thankfully no surgery or cast was needed.

Christmas 2017 my kid got this light up Moon that hangs on the wall in her room and will display the phases of the moon. She just sort of likes the moon and stars, so whatever. After all the presents were opened I wanted to check out this Moon thing my mom got her. It was sealed into the box with zip ties TIGHT. Well what do you use to cut zip ties? Wire cutters or scissors right? Well I was boxed in between my mom and the piano and all I had was a knife. My favorite little paring knife from the kitchen. It's my favorite because it's so sharp. I went to open the moon and the knife slipped out from a zip tie and momentum pushed it down into the back of my hand cutting a gash into my hand that was 1.25 inches long and more than a quarter inch deep. The blade then went back for more and got me in my forearm right above my watch with a superficial cut.

After a quick trip to the ER on Christmas Eve and 6 stitches later, I was back in time to leave cookies and milk out for Santa. And that is how I was wounded in the War on Christmas.

Addendum #1: My wife and I went to the ER in our matching Christmas pajamas.

Addendum #2: The ER bill plus stitch removal was $280 and I received a check from AFLAC for $325. I actually made money by cutting the hell out of myself. Always get the AFLAC "idiot insurance" if offered by your employer.

I was playing football in the front yard (I was in middle school at the time) and my team was on defense. Buddy A threw the ball deep to the guy i was covering and I jumped to make the catch. Unfortunately, Buddy B, the intended target, was in better position than me and also jumped.

In the process of catching the ball he moved his arm back away from the direction of the throw to cushion it into place. Unfortunately, my face was right behind his elbow at this point and he broke my front-left incisor in half with his elbow and we collapsed into a heap in the front yard.

This break exposed the nerve in my tooth to the open air. I do not have words for the agony I felt from this. I screamed bloody murder until my parents came outside to see what the commotion was. They got everyone sorted and brought me inside to clean me up (there was quite a bit of blood since my lip was busted as well). Air hurt, cold hurt, heat hurt, nothing hurt, everything hurt. On top of all this, it was the afternoon of Thanksgiving.

1. When I was 7 or 8, I was riding my bike as fast as I could down a hill in front of my house. My older brother decided to throw a stick at me. In a one-in-a-million shot, the stick actually went into the spokes of the front wheel and it jammed against the frame, stopping the front part of the bike cold while I, and the back part of the bike, flipped over the front. KMTFO. My brother got a whuppin'.

2. Probably about the same age, my brother tried to play a trick and scare me by throwing a yo-yo at my face. It was tied to his finger like a yo-yo normally would be and he had planned to yank it back at the last minute, but the string snapped and said yo-yo hit me in the eyebrow, swelling my eye shut in a matter of seconds. My brother got a whuppin' for that one, too.

3. A couple of years later, my brother (sensing a pattern here?) and I were out in the backyard fooling around. He was pitching one of those big old, red rubber kickballs at me and I was hitting it with a baseball bat. He decided to whip one hard directly at my head, so I kind of defensively tomahawked my swing. I hit the ball squarely, but unfortunately the bat bounced off the rubber ball at the speed of sound and right back into my forehead. You can probably just picture this happening, can't you? I woke up about 10 minutes later with my parents and brother looking down at me. My brother did not get a whuppin' that time.

4. While playing SS for my Little League team, a batter hit a little flare into short CF. I ran out looking over my shoulder, and the CF ran in looking up at the ball. We both yelled "Mine" at the same time, and I dove while he jumped forward for the ball. His shoulder hit my forehead while his knee went into my stomach. I woke up with the entire team standing in a circle looking down at me, like the old Steppenwolf album cover.

5. In Junior High in the early 70's, I was riding my 10-speed home from a friend's house in the middle of winter. It was below freezing and windy, so I was riding as fast as I could with my head down to keep my face from freezing off. I knew the suburban streets well, no real traffic. Suddenly, with my head down, I see a car bumper right there, someone had parked their car in the street where there were never any cars. Boom, front tire hits the bumper hard, and I rocket head-first into the car's rear window and flip over the top and hood of the car. Not only was I briefly knocked out and bleeding, my bike was unride-able because of the bent front forks and I had to carry it home for over a mile.

6. Jumping ahead about 50 years, my most recent one was just a few weeks ago, while getting Xmas decorations down from the attic upstairs. One old huge box that I have used for over 20 years had deteriorated to the point that the cardboard was pretty flimsy. It was big, heavy, and awkward. So, I just pushed it along the floor and decided to get under it and "walk" it backwards sliding it down the flight of stairs from the loft. There is a little landing, where you have to turn and then there is one more stair. I kind of lost my footing on the landing, hit the that last stair awkwardly, and as I was losing my balance and stepping backward, the heel of my shoe got stuck on the edge of an area rug, which propelled my backwards and headfirst across the landing and into a closet door frame. I woke up a minute or two later bleeding from a rapidly swelling bump on the head and from my forearm. Merry bleepin' Christmas!

I had so many things like this happen growing up, we just called it getting our bell rung or seeing the little birdies.I am very fortunate to have never suffered any real consequences of these concussions, plus many more not mentioned here. Hard-headed, I guess...

Early on in my career, I worked for a department that had an annual flag football game against another department. We won almost every year because we had a guy that played QB that could throw lasers. After a couple of years of winning handily, I get a promotion – into the losing team department. They lose very year because the boss wants to play QB, and he has no arm.

We play the game that year with me on the opposite side, and the very first play I'm on defense, and dive to block a pass thrown by laser arm. It hits the end of my middle finger head on, jamming it back into my hand. Instant pain – but I shake it off. I tell my new boss not to throw me the ball because my hand won't work, and act as a decoy the rest of the game. We lose badly, and there is heavy beer consumption late into the evening, which dulls the pain from my aching finger.

Next morning I wake up with a killer hangover, and forget about my finger. I head into the bathroom, take my clothes off, and reach over to turn on the shower. I use the wrong hand and the searing pain from my finger has me seeing stars. I then open my hand and its blue from my wrist right up to the tip of my middle finger. Seeing that in my hungover condition, I proceeded to pass out and fall to the floor hitting my chin on the vanity top, resulting in a pretty decent slice in my jaw, bleeding all over.

Mrs. NY Hokie hears the thud and runs upstairs to see what is wrong. I don't answer, and she can't get the door to the bathroom open because I have fallen in front of it. She finally gets it open, and sees me laying on the ground, naked, and covered in blood. She calls 911, and after a few minutes I wake up and put some clothes on before the EMTs arrive. I end up in the hospital, where I find out the finger is broken in two places, and I get 7 stitches under my chin.

Next day at work I come in with my finger and hand in a pretty big cast, a bandage on my chin, and two black eyes from the impact with the vanity. My co-workers had spent the day prior preparing to roast me about missing work for a sprained finger, and were shocked when they saw me (I did look rough). Best part – workers comp paid for the whole thing. Worst part – CIO banned future football games.

Sorry for the redneck-ness of this story but before my friends and I could drive we would get in one friends farm truck, one would drive and 2-3 would get in the bed and pretty much he would cut donuts and we would try to hang on. Long story short he hit a rut, shitwhipped me out and I broke my wrist. Not wanting to tell my parents I hid it for two days before I literally couldn't move my arm without crying, they were less than happy.

So as an addendum to LancerHokie's story. We were picking up her car tonight and it was the same service rep who called me yesterday afternoon. When he realized it was us, he was "Oh!!! That was you guys?!?!" He proceeded to show us the pictures of what I did to the wheel. I got him to send them to me and here they are.

It wasn't as bad as what I thought when I answered the phone Monday and hear "Um.. I didn't make it to work." but that's pretty nuts. Like I said, we got lucky that we only had to pay for 2 tires, a wheel, and an alignment and not a new car, hospital bills, or worse---funeral expenses.

I've got a long and storied history of clumsiness and injuries, but I think I'll stick with the one that wasn't my fault.

I got stitches, in my TONGUE, on Christmas Eve.

The whole family were all gathered at my maw-maw-in-law's place for Christmas Eve. As the night was wrapping up, around 10:30 or so, I bent down to give my 3-year old niece a hug before heading out the door. She, as toddlers are wont to do, decided to jump straight up in the air for no particular reason, crushing my chin with the top of her head. It hurt a bit initially, but because of the initial shock and my concern for the kiddo, I didn't even notice any particular injury to myself. As I bent down to check on her well-being, she started pointing at my face and crying, which is never good for one's self-esteem. That's when I noticed that I was bleeding profusely from the tip of my tongue. Chaos ensued as I tried to stem the bleeding as well as clean up the mess that I was making in the middle of the living room. We finally got my mess cleaned up and headed to the E.R., arriving a little past 11.

Funny thing about small-town rural hospitals...they don't seem to have a lot of staff on duty late night on a holiday. I sat around the ER waiting room until at least midnight before someone was available to see me. I passed the time by grossing out my wife by sticking out my tongue and flattening it, which caused it to pretty much flop around in three pieces at the tip. I had bitten a very deep Y-shaped cut into my tongue, penetrating almost completely through the damn thing. When the doc finally got to see me, he tried to ease the tension by joking around about how much easier it would be to just finish cutting through and giving me a forked tongue, which was all the rage in the early aughts. The Mrs did not approve. So we set about trying to put my tongue back together.

The first step was to disenfect the wound. It turns out there are no sterilizing agents that don't taste like shit and burn the hell out of the tongue. After that step, it was time to numb the injured body part. I don't know if you've ever experienced lidocaine before, but if you haven't imagine stabbing yourself with a needle, injecting yourself with lighter fluid, and then igniting it. It burns like hell from the inside for a few seconds (that feel like an eternity) before finally dulling the pain receptors. Now imagine that sensation in the nerve-rich area that is the tip of your tongue. I thought I was gonna die. Now that my tongue was finally numb, it was time to do some sewing. First the nurse had to wrap a piece of gauze around my tongue like a rope and pull, hard, to keep my tongue far enough out of my mouth for the doc to work. The tip of my tongue was very numb, but the muscle connecting my tongue to my jaw was not happy. Next the doc had to try and actually stitch the damn thing back together. Apparently the skin of the tongue is very tough, almost like leather. He could barely get the needle through to get the stitch in. He finally gets me all stitched up and on my way out of the ER sometime around 1 am.

But the story doesn't even end here. The stitch in the very tip of my tongue left a ball of scar tissue, which is still there about 13 years later, and gave me, at the time, a terrible lisp. And wouldn't you know it on my first day back at work after the incident, while I was still healing (and lisping) we had a meeting to welcome back a returning colleague named Sara Sisson, who also had a pronounced lisp that she was a bit self-conscious about. So at the morning meeting everyone in the entire room is staring daggers at me, thinking I'm making fun of the lady every time I speak, because I haven't had a chance to share my war story with anyone yet.

TLDR version. Everybody hates getting stitches. But until you've gotten them in your tongue, or other similarly sensitive areas, you can't even imagine how awful it really can be.

“You got one guy going boom, one guy going whack, and one guy not getting in the endzone.”
― John Madden (describing VT's offense?)

Just spent almost two hours reading this thread which I somehow missed when it first posted last week. So here are my additions followed by some observations.

1) At the tender age of three I fell into the corner of a brick fireplace hearth and had to get multiple stitches in my head-siblings called me "fish-head" (cause apparently it smelled for a while afterward-gotta love sibling love-I was the 6th of 7 kids!)

2) at the age of 8, the day after we moved to Richmond, said siblings and I were using the cardboard moving boxes as tobaggans on the grass in our front yard. Several of us would sit on the folded boxes holding up the front while another would run and jump onto the box to get us started. On one of the "runs" the box didn't move and my head snapped forward while my tongue was sticking out ala Michel Jordan. Said tongue was nearly severed in half and ended up requiring about 15 stitches. I missed the first three days of school but had a great intro story to my new classmates.

3) This one was not MY injury but one I caused. Running the 400 meter relay in high school track, I came into the handoff zone hot and the outgoing runner failed to match my pace correctly as he should. My half inch track spike went through the flesh of his ankle narrowly missing his Achilles tendon but fortunately it merely left an inch long gash.

4) I was mowing my parents yard as a teen with a push mower with side discharge without the bag attached. I had a rag tied around the handle so I wouldn't have it cut off if my hand slipped off the handle. At the edge of the yard, I ran over a yellow jacket nest which shot out the side of the mower with a lot of REALLY ANGRY yellow jackets. I got stung about 100-125 times as I ran for my life from the "still-running" mower parked over the nest. I didn't want the mower to keep running so I told my 8 year old sister to run over and cut it off-she only got stung about 10-15 times. I ended up getting a bad case of hives and had to take huge doses of prednisone steroids for about a month. (disgusting tasting tiny pills starting at 10 pills three times a day then stepping down every three days til I was weaned off them)

5) In the mid 80s in my years at VT, I (as many fellow students did) would use trays for sleds. Unlike others however , we had come across some metal sheet pan trays in the basement of Lee Hall and appropriated them to use instead. (Side note- these are much better than the standard cafeteria trays-larger so you can lie down on them or sit on them-and I still have these in my garage 30 years later). Anyway, we were sliding down the hill behind the tennis courts on Washington Street (near the old baseball field when you could watch from the hill (really miss those days) and was holding the front of the tray with my hands when I hit a hole and the tray stopped instantly. Unfortunately while my thumb stopped instantly as well, the rest of me flipped forward. I kept sledding for another two hours with a painful thumb that I later found out was broken into three pieces. (I played basketball in War Memorial with my cast that winter-went through three casts in 6 weeks; if any of you were one of the people I smacked with my cast reaching in while you drove the lane, I apologize!).

6) Tubing on the New River at McCoy Falls, we were drinking (I hear the gasps of "No-really?) and sunning on the rocks at the rapids when the time approached when they released water daily from the dam upstream which raised the depth and flow significantly. WE were making our way over to the side with the cooler when someone threw an empty beer can towards us. Being the civic minded person, I went to grab it and slipped. I managed to hold on to a slimy rock for about thirty seconds before losing my grip and plunging through the rapids. I was wearing swim trunks and a pair of old tennis shoes and put one foot downwards so I'd know when the bottom rose and one foot in front in case I hit rocks and rode the rapids through until the water deepened enough that I managed to swim to the side and crawl onto a rock and nearly pass out. Closest I've ever come to drowning-found out later that about 50 people watched the whole sequence-unable to help me but praying for my safety.

7) Just after graduating, playing basketball in my driveway back home, I came around a pick and someones forehead slammed into my upper lip causing my ears to ring, my vision to narrow and fill with stars and knocked me on my ass. It split my lip wide open. An inch lower and it would have shattered my jaw; an inch higher and it is possible it would have broken my nose and sent it up to my brain and I wouldn't be writing this now. So my friend drove me to the ER where I had to wait for the facial plastic surgeon for two hours. I had to get FOUR shots of anesthesia in my lip (two on the outside and two on the inside) and I can attest to what Brickhaus said above about how bad it tastes and how much it hurts. (I can only think of one other place to get stitches that would hurt more than that!). After getting 15 stitches in my lip, I looked like a duck-billed platypus. As we were leaving the ER and the nurse who had triaged me when I arrived saw me and said "Oh wow ! You look SO much better than you got here!". I thought to myself "Oh my God! How bad did I look then given how I look now!"

(note -I have had stitches at least 5 other times that I know of(including in my eyelid) but those stories aren't that weird.)

Now the observations(after reading all the stories here):

1) In today's world with hospitals looking everywhere for patterns of injuries, I think all our parents would have been in jail for child neglect given the mayhem we all went through in our younger days.

2) Today's young people lead sheltered lives by comparison. ( I turn 54 this year for point of reference)

3) It's amazing the amount of things that happened to just the 150-200 people who have posted here as of me typing this. The fact that we are alive and kicking means maybe we should go in on lottery tickets!

4) I've only been to lot 18 one time (last fall) but now I'm a little leery of going there again 'cause -given the "luck" we've seen here-I'm afraid it will get destroyed by a meteor during one of the tailgates there!

Thankfully this didn't happen to me, but I'll never forget it. Was playing (well was attending, viewing from the bench) a little league baseball game (I was never any good), and the opposing team was up to bat. There was a runner on second, and the batter hits a sharp line drive...straight into the nuts of the runner at second base. I have never in my life seen a kid crumple so fast. Poor guy actually wound up getting taken on the field in an ambulance, and he couldn't have been older than twelve.

I feel the kid's pain. I used to play on a company slowpitch softball team back when I was younger. I took a line drive right to the uppermost part of the inner thigh about 1/2" below the fellas. I managed to somehow pick up the ball and throw the batter out at first before collapsing into a quivering heap. The ball hit me so hard that by morning the bruise had spread all the way down to a couple inches below my knee. I can't even imagine how it would've felt had that ball been hit an inch higher.

Semi-related story: We had a goalie on my HS lacrosse team who, for the longest time, refused to wear a cup. Coach finally convinced him to start wearing one by threatening to bench him until he started protecting himself. Soon thereafter, he took a shot to the jimmies in practice so hard that it broke his cup in half. Even with the cup, it was about 20-30 minutes before the man could stand up straight.

“You got one guy going boom, one guy going whack, and one guy not getting in the endzone.”
― John Madden (describing VT's offense?)

I've played a lot of slow pitch softball as a pitcher. One time I took a shot off my shin that sounded like another bat hit the ball. The runner basically stopped for a minute, which was all I needed to chase the ball down and throw him out. I stayed in the game but couldn't walk normally for quite a while. Luckily only a contusion.

Also, I have a friend that had the same thing happen to him in lacrosse, only his was during a game. He let out this high pitched squeal once his cup split as his knees buckled inward and dropped to the ground. Probably the only reason he has a kid now was because of that cup.

When I was 5 I was at an aunt's new house with family looking at her renovations. I saw my cousin playing in a sandbox and asked if I could go play with her, then take off running. I hear a crash and find myself surrounded by glass and distinctly remember thinking "there are kids playing, that's not safe." Turns out I had run straight through a sliding glass door, another aunt grabs a towel off the floor to apply pressure to my gaping head wound and I'm off to the hospital. The guy that's there to stitch me up is all of 500 pounds and rolling around in an office chair instead of walking which to a 5 year old with blood-stained eyes and an overactive imagination seems oddly similar to a cyborg of some kind, he moves the towel to survey the damage, which is a formidable G shaped piece of skin flapping about my forehead, and we realize the towel that was slapped on my head in a split second decision is covered with sawdust. Now this cyborg has to clean a tree out of my brain before stitching me up, but as he's looking at the task at hand, right above my eyes mind you, his hands are shaking hard enough to mix a gallon of paint. After a couple seconds hesitation, he announces (again, out loud in front of the fucking 5 year old gushing blood) that he can't do it. Fuck you kid, bleed out, don't run through doors. In comes my Asian savior, quickly rids my brain of sawdust, sews up my scalp, another few stitches on my hand, good as new.

Shortly after getting the stitches out, I returned to the hospital for a tetanus shot after sticking a pitchfork all the way through my big toe. I was one of those kids that the doctors liked to ask what REALLY happened and are you sure you're safe?

Senior year I was on the baja team at Tech. The ag department gave us some land out by St. Mary's school to build a test course. Creek down the middle, open field up a hill to the left, wooded hill to the right. We decide to cut a course through the woods. We rent a bobcat and a few chainsaws and go to town. Nice curvy track through the woods and someone decides to make a ski jump down the middle. We clear trees and then sink some logs straight up in the air with about 5 feet below grade and 6 feet above. Then we stack logs agains the uprights. Bobcat dumps clay on the logs and tamps it down. I look up the hill from the base of the ramp and think to myself "Someone's gonna kill themselves on this." Our tech lead decides to try it in last year's car (slow, heavy, and with crap suspension). He hits it at 75% speed and it bottoms out the suspension and jerks his back something awful. We make a rule that noone goes off the ski jump.

Fast forward a few years, I've got my kid at a touch a truck event at 1st and main. The baja team has a tent and I'm talking up some of the current team members. I tell them I was on the team that built the ski jump and they inform me that one of their team members took it at full speed and didn't have his fifth harness point situated correctly. Hits the landing hard and bounces around against the harness. Ends up being taken to the hospital and losing a testicle.

Buckle up, kids...carefully.

Warning: this post occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)..

These first two happened before I can remember, but I've been regaled with the stories my whole life.
1) I apparently decided to find out what head and shoulders tasted like. Parents find out and called the poison control. Late seventy's doctor says I'll be fine, just really sick, and that it'll clean me out, no visit. I get very sick, have bubbles coming out of mouth, nose, and everywhere else, and I'm testing the maximum capacity of my diaper. But, I was fine.
2) Next week l guess I had a craving for something crunchy. So I get into the Decon. Parents, despite fear that they'll get there attention of child services, do call the poison control for the second week in a row. Again I was fine.
Now to ones I remember.
3) I was maybe three years old, at my grandmother's. She had a screen door on her porch, the kind that has the glass that you can open and close by sliding up or down. Anyway, the cylinder for the door was below the glass, about chest high for three year old me. My brother decided to go outside to play. I decided to shut the door to keep him outside. So I grab the cylinder to pull the door shut. The cylinder pinched the middle finger on my left hand, requiring there huge blue stiches. I still have the scar.
4) Fast forward a few years, I'm playing youth baseball, my grandmother's going to take me to practice. I go toss my glove into her 1972 Impala. I toss my glove in, slam the heavy door shut and go to walk away. But I can't. I look back to see that I had slammed my right thumb in the door. Shocked and scared, my reaction is to jerk my thumb from the door. I get it free and see that it's missing a hunk of meat, and I wonder why it doesn't hurt. Right about then it starts hurting like hell. Run to Grandma's house screaming, she bandages it up and we head to practice. To this day my right thumb is considerably shorter and wider, from the knuckle out, than my left.
I have quite a few other sports, and farm related injury stories (ribs broken by a ram, elbow sprained sliding into home playing softball in p.e. class, etc). But the most recent, and more stupid than random, injury was a few months ago I'm pretty sure that I broke something in my foot when I missed the rat I was kicking at and instead made contact with the concrete wall that I failed to realize was behind him in the cattle barn on our farm. At first I thought I just jammed my big toe badly, but it hurt for a couple of months, and still does sometimes. So, I figure it was more than a jam.

I did something similar when I was a kid. I was shutting the car door and slammed 3 fingers of my left hand (middle, ring, and pinky) in the door. Hurt like hell and bled for a while and ended up being bruised. I remember walking around the rest of the afternoon with my hand wrapped up and a baggie of ice.

1. Was doing a community service thing, helping out this horse farm with basic maintenance. They had a program where they used the horse activities as an outreach to troubled teens, and my church men's group had a schedule set up to rotate us through a few at a time to help out. Well, after my turn, the lady that ran it was like "let's go ride horses for a little while" so me and another volunteer were like "sound fun".

Now, I know nothing about horses or horse back riding. I had no idea that saddles have to be fit to the horse in order to stay on. I was not initially told my horse was a new acquisition that they had yet to saddle up and try out. This is a key point because said manager didn't know anything about this d*mn horse she was about to put me on. So we get out on the trail, and the d*mn saddle keeps wanting to slide around. So we keep stopping to tighten it up. And I learned this too - my work boots didn't really fit well into the stirrups, I learned why cowboy boots are pointy that day.

So we're 30 minutes into the ride, and I'm on an unreliable saddle, with boots that aren't fitting into the stirrups well, riding a horse that is increasingly not wanting to stop when you pull the reins or otherwise follow riders direction. Manager lady is like "hmm, that's weird, usually they don't fight you like that." I'm thinking vulgar thoughts at this point I won't type out.

Then, all the sudden, the saddle that doesn't fit slips and I find myself parallel to the ground trying not to fall off. Horse freaks, takes off and starts bucking. I realize I need to abandon ship at this point, and somehow I manage to launch myself with my a$$ muscles out away from the horse, and promptly go into the ground at full gallop speed, landing on my side. Managed to distribute the load over a big part of my body, didn't break anything, but jarred my head something awful.

Had to finish the ride all woozy, was slurring speech, etc. Afterwards manager lady starts telling me she'd never had anyone ride that horse, it was new, didn't have a saddle that fit it well...I'm like "and you put ME, a guy that hasn't ever ridden a horse before, on it??!!" Got home, wife at the time was like you need to go to the ER. Went, was diagnosed with a concussion. Took a week to stop slurring speech completely and for the headache to go away completely.

Second Story, not as long - Had volunteered to water flowers around the neighborhood pool. Was doing it one night, job required dragging the hose around from inside and throwing it over a fence to get to specific areas to water. Fence is wrought iron, with arrowhead like spikes at the top of the vertical bars. Got careless on one particular instance of tossing the hose over the fence and drug my forearm across the point of one of the tips. Felt a scratch, and was like "oh how bad is it?", looked the skin was opened up down to the fat layer, about 4 1/2-inches long. I just thought "oh f***, that's gonna start gushing blood in a second". Strangely enough it never did. Somehow I didn't hit any kind of blood vessel. It just had a few red bubbles form around the edge. Looking at it, I could clearly see the fat layer that underlays the skin. Was nice and white. Got home, cleaned it, disinfected it, closed it up with butterfly stitches, covered it with a layer of liquid bandaid, and then taped a gauze dressing on top of it. My tetanus shots are up to date, so all good there. Never went to the doc. It eventually knitted back together and today I just have this purple scare where it happened. I still am amazed that it didn't bleed hardly at all. I tell people it was a from a knife fight I got in while in Mexico with the appropriate "should have seen the other guy" comment thrown in.

When i was about 8 i went to the hospital twice in one day for stiches. Both in my face. First one i got knocked down foolin around with my brother and popped open my chin on the patio. Several hours later after returning home i was running around with the arrow from a toy bow and arrow set (wooden shafts) sticking the rubber arrow cup on the wall and making the 'pop' sound when you pulled it off. Well eventually the cup stuck really well one time and when i pulled it harder to get it free i missed taking my eyeball out with the back end of the arrow by about a half an inch but ripped open my upper cheek. Back to the hospital for stiches again. This was around 1976 or so but even back then the doctors had a long talk with me to make sure my dad wasn't smacking me around or something.

My wife takes the kids and leaves the house while I watch my Hokie games.........nuff said

When I was 11 I was playing SS in Little League and got a bad hop grounder in the mouth. Loosened up a front tooth and my lip swelled to a huge size. Ended up pitching last 2 innings of that game as the ugliest pitcher ever. Had to get a root canal and eventually (as a young adult) a crown on that front upper tooth.

Reason for telling that story is that tooth caused another injury later in life.

1987: Surfing at Pet Den (its the name of a surf break) in Satellite Beach, FL. Dawn. Good clean surf with no one out but me. Get a good left and tuck into a barrel. All is well for a few seconds until the lip closed out on my head driving my head down into my knee. Wiped out with my head ringing. Came up and was floating on the inside getting my act back together with pieces of something in my mouth. My crown tooth had sheared off my lower tooth below it at an angle down to the dentine (luckily not down to the nerve), breaking it into several pieces. Dentist tried to repair it so it looked normal, but nothing ever would stay. That tooth is still the same and healed on its own, just not as long as before.

2010: While living on Grant Farm Island (Grant Farm Island), I am doing yard work (we had lots of palms in our yard, which require regular trimming). Some are pretty young and therefore short. I lean in to grab some fronds I just cut and one of the new shoots sticking straight up from a palm tree sticks me in the left eye and goes into the gap on the outside edge inside my eye socket. Hurt like a SOB! I go look in a mirror and there is a small green twig sticking out of that location about 1/4 inch. Not. Good. Bob.
So off to the ER, which requires I take our daily use boat from the island to the shore and then drive myself to the ER (wife is out shopping). Get there and the nurse doesn't want to remove it (no doctors around). I talk him into it and he gets it out (that hurt like an SOB also!!), but he looses it on the floor and says until we see that we got it all I can't leave. He cant find it. While he leaves for a bit, I get up and look around myself, literally crawling across the floor, and I find it. Its the entire twig, fully intact. Great, I can go home and have happy hour with the wife and friends on the island (we partied a LOT out there!!!). Eye was a little sensitive for a few days, but was just fine. Lucky!!!

A couple more surf stories:

1981: While I am co-oping as a VT student for Harris Corp in Melbourne, FL, my Dad gets stationed at Roosevelt Roads Navy Base in Puerto Rico. As a surfer, this is like Christmas in July! MAC air flights as a Navy dependent from Florida to PR three times a year, surfboard in hand, for $10!! Sign. Me. Up!
Was there for Christmas that year surfing Wilderness on the NW side (trade winds are offshore there every day!). Get a nice left all the way inside and do an off the top in the close out section and pull it off. Jump off the board and then come up to paddle back out. BAM! Board hits me square in the face (wind blew it back at me) on my left cheek. I feel it, no blood. Good, Start paddling back out and see red drips into the water. Damn! Check face again, nice hole in my cheek that's bleeding enough to make me the #1 choice on the menu for every shark around (and if I stayed out there I endanger everyone else around me as well). So, went in, drive to local clinic and have a local Dr stitch me up. Pretty sure my trip is over (other than partying heavily). Friends and I come up with a plan to put vaseline on it and cover it with duct tape. I surfed for three days this way for the rest of that trip. Worked like a champ. Got weird looks but the waves were great. I still have a scar there.

1985: My graduation present to myself in 1985 was a backpack trip across Mexico with my brother and friend from Corpus Christi, TX to surf the mainland on the Pacific side. We surfed spots like Pascuales, Rio Nexpa, Rio Ticla, and Petacalco. Petacalco is almost like Pipeline. Its insane. Big, hollow, and luckily a sand bottom.
To make a long story short, on the 2nd day at Petacalco, the surf is easy 15-20 ft faces, truck size barrels. I am inside after a great ride and paddling out as fast as possible. Too late, caught inside on a set wave where the lip hits directly in front of me. Jump up on board and dive as deep as I can before impact, not enough. I get the double spin cycle and then am deposited by the wave on the bottom on my back (like I said, lucky it was sand). Two wave hold down! Held down for a long time. Finally can move, push off the bottom and swim for the surface (after breaking waves of this size the entire water column is full of air, so its density is significantly reduced and you cant displace water too fast), I nearly drowned (who knows where the closest hospital is). Luckily my board is right next to me - I throw an arm over it and take a huge breathe. Whew. Brother sees me and shouts: "Mike! More set waves! Move it." I can barely move, but if I do that again, I'm dead. Paddled for the horizon and barely made it back out past the rest of the set. That was the closest to drowning i ever had. Rested on the outside for a while and then back at it. Those four days at Petacalco were some of the most insane surf I ever experienced.
Here's a video of Petacalco: https://vimeo.com/184579086

Ok. So only part of this has happened so far (and hopefully the second half doesn't happen). But this is the story of how I was arrested for assault at a funeral.

Beginning (All events in this section REALLY happened)
My dad and grandfather are estranged from the rest of the family. My grandfather had a stroke right after Christmas and was in the hospital not doing well. After several days of him being in the hospital, my dad decided to let his siblings now what was going on. 3 of his siblings came to the hospital. My dad told his sisters that my grandfather had a very minimal life insurance policy and no other money. One sister told my dad that if he "shopped around" he might find better prices. She also told my dad that when their brother was cremated, it only cost about $1,000. My dad reminded her that their brother didn't have a funeral and that he was pretty sure that my grandfather would want a service. She told my dad that if he didn't use the funeral home (had the service at a church), it would be free. The final straw was when she said "Hobby Lobby has some nice boxes and vases."

Fast forward to this past weekend. My grandfather is in a nursing home and has taken a turn for the worse. My dad had been at the nursing home pretty much around the clock. Monday comes and my grandfather passed away. My dad and a different sister are at the nursing home when it happened. His sister offered to call the others. So she called the Hobby Lobby sister. HL's reaction was "Okay. Where are you?" The other sister responded that she was at the nursing home and that she was there when he passed . HL said "Oh, I'm sorry you were there when he died."

My dad has the funeral all arranged and has asked the 4 siblings to give him any pictures they have of my grandfather with them/their kids. Only 1 sister(the one who was with my dad) offers any pictures....

Looking into the future to Saturday****(this is what hopefully doesn't happen)
The siblings and my grandfather's ex-wife show up to the funeral. The 3 other siblings make smart @$$ comments and complaints about the choices that my dad made. My mother hears these comments and goes off on the siblings, especially my dad's youngest estranged sister. I hear the commotion and go to assist my mother. My grandfather's ex-wife also makes stupid comments and also starts causing a scene and being a drama queen. Keep in mind they have been divorced for almost 40 years. I get pissed at the ex-wife and snatch her wig off and start beating her with it.

TL;DR- "God is great. Beer is good. People are crazy." "Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding." People caused a scene at a funeral and I took care of business. I don't deal well with stupid people. Also there's a reason my dad is estranged from most of his relatives.

Unfortunately if I end up knocking the crap out of these people, I would be doing it while sober. I am hoping we get lucky and the eSTRANGEd relatives don't show up...

HokieEnginerd already said that he would sell the footage to one of the local news stations for my bail money. Although I do have a list of friends who love me and have agreed to help bail me out should it come to this.

Update: Funeral was today.
I did not get arrested!!
Hobby lobby sister and the brother showed up for 10 minutes at the visitation and left before the funeral. The one sister who has been behaving was at the visitation and funeral. Other obnoxious people did not show up.😁

As a 40 year old, ruptured my Achilles tendon while playing football with 12 year olds. I was stretching to catch a pass like a 1st baseman stretches for a throw. Thought one of the kids stepped on my heel. Was on the ground in pain. My wife, who is retire RN with a orthopaedic surgery specialty, came out to look at it, then told me to quit causing a fuss and get up off the ground. To add more insult to injury, 4 days later after misstepping 5 or 6 times, resulting in a lot of pain, I went to the Dr. In about 10 sec he diagnosed a ruptured achilles tendon. On the drive home, my wife tells me "with your low threshold for pain, this is going to be a horrible ordeal for you". Good times.

One another note, I don't want to tell stories on my son, but WarHokie has a few glorious stories to add to this thread. Not sure if he wants to admit to them, though.

1. When I was in grade school in a mid-1960's Atlanta snow event, I was sledding down the hill by our house. Neighbor girl, much heavier than me, backed into the path of my sled which cut the legs out from under her. She landed on top of me pushing my you-know-what between the narrow slats of the sled, kind of mash-mangling it. Thought I was going to die.

2. Circa 1986, I'm standing on a street corner across from Dept of Interior in DC waiting for the light to change so we can cross. Three of us are going to brief one of the agency higher-ups. It's Jan/Feb-ish; really cold, and the wind is howling. Tree limb falls and knocks me silly. Stocking hat probably prevented a trip to the ER.

3. Last August, I rupture the tibialis posterior muscle right below below my knee...just lifting/swinging my leg to get off of a rear engine riding mower. I'm still limping.

Random Wounds:
1. Sliced open my knee taking out the garbage when I was in middle school - My mom had broken some glass and put it in the trash. She then told me to take out the garbage and I pushed down on the plastic garbage bag with my knee. I think we closed it up with a couple of butterfly stiches.

2. Restaurant wounds - I've nearly sliced off the tip of my finger on a meat slicer, imbedded a French knife ~ 1 inch into tip of my thumb trimming the fat off of a beef roast, and I've got a bunch of weird shaped burns.

3. Young and stupid - I broke my wrist (impact fracture) trying to dunk a basketball by using a wooden bench as a step/launching pad on a drizzly day at an outdoor court. Wooden benches get slippery in the rain and I don't bounce. Went 2 days before getting x-rays. My mom was a girls b-ball coach and she wrapped and was like here's an ice pack it will be fine. It kept hurting and I went to the nurses office to replace the ice pack and she called my mom to say I needed x-rays. I was begging for her to just give me another ice pack and let me get back to class

4. Thrown golf club to the nuts: High school golf match (i sucked but it was free golf). My team mate shanked a drive during a match and then proceeded to spin all the way around and fling his club. I was standing off to the side and slightly behind him. His driver made 3 complete revolutions and the club head smacked me square. I dropped and rolled for 5 minutes while my team mate and the 2 opposing player just stood there in shock. I finished the round but I don't know what I scored.

Close Calls:
I severed the front passenger tire off of my Chrysler Lebanon convertible. I was living in norther CA, working in San Francisco and living in Burlingame. I was working at a new restaurant concept as the General Manager (I had a small ownership stake). I had just finished 20 hours at the restaurant and was headed home for a nap before returning to open for the next mornings breakfast. I didn't make it home before the nap started, I fell asleep and the wheel and just missed a telephone pole at ~ 35+ mph. I didn't hit the main pole but one of the steel cables that hold up the pole cut into the front of the car and severed the passenger side tire and axle off the car. I convinced the tow truck driver to give me a ride home. My boss/partner was pissed that I missed opening the restaurant the next morning. I quit about a week later.

Not Me but Life Changing:
~ 12 years ago now. My buddy rented a cabin during a Hokie football weekend. I invite a coworker to come down to the game, He surprises me with tickets to the O's and Yankees in Baltimore the next day. The girl that I was seeing at the time wasn't very happy with that but she was still coming down for the game. Hang out at cabin Friday night, tailgate and game Saturday, hang out at cabin Saturday night. Get up at sunrise and head to Baltimore for baseball. Girlfriend and my friend that rented the cabin decide to rent 4-wheelers somewhere near Meadows-of-Dan. I'm driving to Baltimore talking to my coworker about how I really like this girl. We make it to baseball, my phone goes crazy in like the 3rd inning - it's my girlfriend "WHY AREN"T YOU HERE!!!!" Crying profusely. Ummm we talked about this, my coworker got me baseball tickets as a thank you for football tickets. "YOU SHOULD BE HERE!!!" She flipped the 4 wheeler she was riding trying to show off and skid to a stop next to my buddy. Owner of the rental place was like - I wouldn't take my cat to the local hospital, here's some Tylenol, You're better off driving to Charlotte (where my buddy lived). So, buddy's wife drives his car w/ his kids back to charlotte, he drives my girlfriend and her car to the ER. She broke the elbow on one arm and a thumb on the other. She spent a week going to doctor's in Charlotte and then I picked her up at the airport. She's Mrs. Pailholder now, and not allowed to ride 4 wheelers 🤪

Run to Win. Pass To Score
Josh Jackson on Ricky Walker - ““He is the captain of this team, He’s the leader. He’s the bell cow, the Pail Holder.“

The worst things that have happened to my body have all involved me needing an Epipen and are therefore not really fun enough to share.

But there are some others that are. When I was a kid, I lost balance going downhill and crashed my bicycle into a barbed wire fence running parallel, slid along it a bit (the fence ran parallel to the bike path) and somehow wound up with the bike on top of me. Came away with a pretty gnarly scar on my right arm.

At 18 I was again on a bicycle pedaling up the Huckleberry Trail to the NRV Mall, when a pebble got stuck in the front wheel's spokes. The bike stopped, I did not, and my balls got acquainted with the midpoint of the handlebars. I stopped moving midair and crumpled (not unlike Brandin Cooks getting tackled on 3rd and short in Super Bowl 52), in such agony and trying so hard not to piss myself that when I waved my arms and attempted to yell "help" to the people downhill from me walking the other direction, no sound came out. I eventually got back on the bike and headed home.

I was with some friends down at the Little River in Floyd County a few years ago climbing a big rock, when I lost my grip and slid all the way down into the water, my right foot slammed into the underwater portion of the same rock and I immediately felt like something had broken (it wound up just being a sprain). One of my dumbass friends decides that since I'm in the water and he's in the water, it's time to wrestle. Motherfucker almost drowned me, because he failed to realize I had only one good leg, and it took him longer than it should have to get it.

One almost-bad dumbass moment: I was having a drunken float at the New River Junction with some different friends about a year later when I fell out of the tube reaching for my beer, right around the little rapids that exist there. Somehow I avoided blowing out my knee on a rock and got back into the tube, but I was millimeters away from being crippled, drunk, and in the middle of the New River, with no real way to get back to shore or fight the current (my friends were all as drunk as me).

with no real way to get back to shore or fight the current (my friends were all as drunk as me).

APFOW Safety PSA: Don't fight the current. That's one of the quickest ways to drown.

A little story to illustrate my point. One of good friends in high school was almost 2 years older than me. Naturally, he got his license before me, and the summer he got it we spent almost every day on the New.

We were enjoying a day of fishing and swimming when we got the big idea to swim across the river. We were in Giles near the end of Spruce Run where the river is fairly calm.

My family had essentially raised me on the New. We had been going there ever since I could remember and by high school I had street smarts, or river smarts if you will, when it came to enjoying it.

My friend had literally started going to the river that summer.

So, before we swim across I give him a little safety brief. I warn him that once we get out there the current is going to start to take him. I tell him not to panic, to keep swimming toward the other shore, and that he would wind up down stream a bit, but he would get there fine. I said "whatever you do, do NOT fight the current."

He says "okay," and we begin our journey across.

I was a little stronger swimmer than him, and had gotten a point on the other side where I could stand up when I hear him screaming bloody murder.

I look back and this fool is swimming straight upstream, and I yell at him to "swim to me, and stop fighting the current."

He keeps fighting it and I wind up having to swim back out and pull him in to the opposite shore from where we started. It was the closest by this time.

I get him in and spend the next few minutes yelling at him for not listening to me and swimming straight upstream. I then tell him to take as much time as he needs to catch his breath, because the car is on the other side and we have to swim back.

He refuses to move.

"Dude, we have to. The car is over there," I say.

He will not budge and tells me that I have to go get the car and pick him up.

I spend the next five minutes protesting, and reminding him that I still don't have my license (he doesn't care) before realizing how futile are my protests.

So, I swim back across, get the car, drive all the way to Eggleston, back up the river road on the opposite side, and pick him up.

So, don't fight the current, kids. You might die. Or your friend will never let you live it down that he had to pull you out of the river, swim back across by himself, get the car, drive to the nearest bridge and all the way back without a license pick your sorry ass up. All because you're an idiot.

"How the ass pocket will be used, I do not know. Alls I know is, the ass pocket will be used."
- The BoD

Drunk running down the huck behind my Green St. my junior year. Tripped down a hill and lost one of my shoes and had to army crawl back since it was hard enough to run with two healthy ankles drunkenly, definitely couldn't hop back on one.

his wife's a nurse and gave him the flu shot...just kidding I have no idea

Warning: this post occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)..

Accidentally? On purpose? Did you do something extremely stupid? C'mon man....

On a related story, my mom almost shot my dad once. When my dad was in the Army, they lived in Huntsville, AL. There was some crime going on when they lived there, so my dad took my mom to the range and taught her to shoot. He told her that if anybody tried to come in the apartment to shoot through the door. So one day my dad leaves to go to work/school and my mom locked and chained the door since she would be home alone. My dad realized that he forgot something important and goes back to the apartment. He unlocked the door then realized that my mom had chained the top. He opened the door and was reaching through to unlock the chain. My mom sees the arm coming through the door and is ready to protect herself. She sees the army uniform and my dad's watch and asks if it is him. He answered yes, opened the door and saw her standing there with the gun ready to fire.

I had a similar story with HokieEnginerd... When we first got married, we were living in an apartment in Manassas... So one night, I was talking to my mom on the phone, running the dishwasher, cooking dinner, and doing laundry. HE thought it would be funny to sneak up on me because I was distracted. The apartment had a high counter so he came into the apartment and crept around the counter. I was walking out of the kitchen and all of a sudden this male in dark clothing jumped out at me. I screamed (freaking my mother out). She hears him in the background and realized that I was somewhat okay... Had he done it 5 minutes earlier, I would have had a knife in my hand and I would have stabbed him. So yeah, that is how my husband almost committed wife-assisted suicide.

Well, maybe... But he is seriously lucky that I didn't stab him because I had been chopping something while I was cooking supper just moments before he decided to scare the crap out of me. If I had the knife in my hand, I would have stabbed him first and asked questions later.

Happened last night and thought of this thread. Was trying to make mashed potatoes for dinner after getting home from work. Just bought a brand new peeler as our other one had broke. I go over the trash can, grip the potato, and on the first peel, it goes the length of the potato and continues straight through my index finger. A few expletives and a smashed potato later, I'm on my way to urgent care. The gash is so big that there's no real ability to stitch it so doctor just cleans it up and gives me some bandaids and tells me now is my chance to rob a bank since I no longer have a finger print...

I took a reset on the fingerprints on the three middle fingers on my left hand about 10 years ago when I reached down to grab the still red hot skirt of a keg that we'd cut the top off of in the process of making...ummm...something...that needed to boil for a long time.

5 major knee surgeries, some other assorted shit through the years, and those burns were the worst pain I've ever experienced.

Got these injuries a week and a half ago - took me a couple days to get all the details of what happened from friends. I woke up the next day feeling very sore, with 2 scraped up knees, and part of my left thumbnail missing.

I participated in the Cupid Undie Run in DC - people raise a bunch of money for Neurofibromatosis research, go to a bar, drink, quickly run in their underwear, and then continue drinking. I already went for a run in the morning, had a healthy breakfast of scrambled eggs and an apple. I then proceeded to drink, did the run in just running shorts, and continued drinking. Until 11 pm. I did not eat at all. I do remember going to an after party at another bar in DC, making friends, and a group of us went back to my place to drink more (I have a bar in my living room). I then go back out to someone's birthday and this is where my memory goes. I apparently ended up literally running around - I was still wearing my running gear. There is video evidence of me turning a corner and eating it on the sidewalk and just popping back up. Zero recollection of this or how I got home, but I do know I ended up getting pizza and upon eating it I came to.

"That move was slicker than a peeled onion in a bowl of snot." -Mike Burnop